The "Third Way", etc.

This is in response to something Kasey wrote on his blog, which includes at the moment writing by both him and Michael Magee that is worth reading if you have any interest in this debate:

My sense is: so much as you permit there being "two ways," there will have to -- especially for a good Hegelian -- be a third way. But if one lives in a universe of heterogenous (however provisional) wholes coming in conflict with each other at all points, none with compelling claims to be more ascendant than others (this is, of course, possible), then these "thirds" will always themselves be provisional, and are if anything aids to thinking. (If these "claims" are compelling, then the "third ways" tend to have a revolutionary aspect to them -- as it might have in England when Pound was there -- performing what might be the function of a "second" or "other" way. It's obviously most salient when a language -- such as Italian -- is being used for the first time to peform in fashions usually reserved for other languages, in this example, Latin. We have no such divide right now unless someone were to attempt a poem or novel in Black American English -- far as I know.)

If one were to put on a small books shelf Pierre Guyotat's Eden Eden Eden , Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons and William Burrough's Naked Lunch, then put -- on the other side of the bookshelf -- Robert Lowell's Life Studies, Edgar Lee Master's Spoon River Anthology and even -- for kicks -- the collected Robert Frost or the Amy Lowell of "Patterns" -- her exploitation of the idea of "imagism" -- you could probably place most Language poetry somewhere in between. Language poetry often has the reproducibility of form that one associates with the latter writers -- one hits upon something and is able to exploit it for an impressive duration -- with the modernist charge of the former -- desparate acts of creation often involving ephemerality and "failure" -- but in neither case entirely sacrifices a claim to "realism" entirely (at least among the Americans, who can often recuperate their work into a philosophy of pragmatism), nor to a secure position in relation to national norms of discourse (i.e. what is not allowed to be said). I.e. the very functionality of the method seems to preclude there being as negative a charge as might occur in a neo-romantic vein (whether our neo-romantic be Rimbaud, Kafka or Beckett -- and these are hardly Romantics!).

I'm being schematic here (and maybe confusing), but certainly, much of RS's writing will tend toward the side of autobiographical, and more or less dispassionate, social realists than it will on the side of the fiery or oddball, truly "negative" writing of the formal innovators. This doesn't make it "bad" writing -- I'm a fan of much of his work, obviously, just look at /ubu -- but because a formal technique is being employed (in his case the "new sentence," which never, frankly, struck me as radical) hardly spares a poem (such as his tiring, distracted Roof book "N/O") from being branded as passive -- about language, about society, about issues of epistemology and genre. What can be more "quietudinous" than a passivity regarding these issues? In comparison, the tortured, jagged, compressed rhythms of Lowell's "The Skunk Hour" come off as punk rock.

I don't think any Language poet with the exception of Bruce Andrews (and maybe Bernstein and Watten) has taken the project of the evisceration of national social (or linguistic) mores to the same extremes thant the great French tradition (or anti-tradition) of Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Lautreamont, Jarry, the Situationists (Guyotat is often identified as one of them), etc. -- not to mention predecessors Rousseau or de Sade. Most Language writing looks quite polite and "healthy" in comparison, at least from this perspective -- the Protestant ethic of the good work done daily in order to "make it new" appears as a subprogram of much of this writing. This is not a statement about American poetry as a whole -- that's more complex -- or all of Language poetry -- the fragmentary nature of Bernstein's early and middle-period writing seems to me attentive to this ethics of failure, of anti-systemicity, in "hot" modernism -- but oddly, someone like Plath occupies a more critical space -- there with Ginsberg and Burroughs -- than one would think. There is an "out on a limb" aspect to what she was trying to do that is impressive to me, and her later method doesn't strike me as less "radical" than that of, say, Rae Armantrout -- quite the contrary, in fact.

When I hear about a truly national debate (or maybe a good essay by Christopher Hitchens) about the unquietudinous-ness of Language poetry then I will be impressed -- so far, it has not happened. There's nothing wrong with this, of course, I just don't understand how one can point to a "lineage" in one's writing as somehow conferring a badge on a writer as being on the good side of a -- presumed, but in my mind quite "imaginary" -- literary divide. To suggest Language poets as somehow sweating in the trenches and other poets not -- categorically -- strikes me as nonsense. And it always seems to involve the rather limited purview of "American" writing -- observing how the two principled, dueling Scots, MacDiarmid and Finlay, came to a rapprochement at the end of the former's career should be illustrative of where the future -- for "us" -- lies. Much of this won't matter: the 1200 pages of The Alphabet will be judged on its own merits as something to read, as will the 60 or so pages of Life Studies. We can only guess why these works will be interesting in the future, one that may not even have room for such concepts as "perfect binding."

(P.S. It's ironic that, in that bit from Duncan, he quotes the end of the Lowell poem about Delmore Schwartz. My favorite ending of a Duncan poem is that one in which some attention to different registers of style in contrapuntal play is demonstrated, and that ends:

A second: a moose painted by Stubbs,
where last year's extravagent antler's
      lie on the ground.
The forlorn moosey-faced poem wears
      new antler-buds,
      the same,

"a little heavy, a little contrived,"

his only beauty to be
      all moose.

It's actually the same kind of compression that Lowell brings in at the end fo the Schwartz poem -- a sudden swerve from the dominant, even heroic, meter into a bathetic, skipping tone, finally focusing on a fine point at the end as if the poem were balanced on a pin, like some geological balancing act out in the Yellowstone Park. Duncan almost seems drunk here himself -- and I like it. Ironically, the climas results in a telescoped image of an animal (or animal part) -- "strong" imagism, a la white chickens, coming to save the day again.

Few poets were more afraid of letting his metrics be taken over by anything as vulgar as social realism or speech as Duncan -- I find so much of him unreadable because of all the gaudy European trappings, the Pound-envy, the loping "stately" rhythms and capitalized Nouns, like he were Philip Sydney and didn't know better, or Mallarme, enriching every detail with "correspondence". I guess I just never believed he had as much access to higher states of knowledge than the rest of us -- I hope it's fair to be suspicious here, since he made some huge claims. In terms of "fear" versus "freedom," I'm not sure that Duncan wins. One is, after all, quite free before the "void" -- it is, after all, the evacuation of meaning that provided some of the bases for the theory of Language writing itself (and that brought Mallarme himself to start slinging words across the page like dice).

When Duncan starts psycho-analyzing his writers -- Spicer is apparently the poet of "death" while he himself was of life, or sex, or whatever, from my dim memory of the Spicer biography -- one must -- as a good iconoclast and heretic -- recoil, as it's clear such oppositional binaries are only intended to create the image of power around the naming creature, ye who sets terms (terms being, in themselves, very useful). Sacrificing this power for the sake of flows, on the one hand, or in service of the dialectic, on the other, seems to me to be imperative -- if that doesn't sound too much like a "spiritual" disposition. But they must at the same time be questioned at all moments if possible -- why not, seems to me the only confirmation of living that is reliable.

Posted by Brian Stefans at July 4, 2003 07:19 PM | TrackBack